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June 2002 Sermons
June 9, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanJune 9, 2002Islam and the Western World: Old and New CollideThere is a passage in the Hebrew Scripture/Old Testament Joshua 9:17, and one in the Christian New Testament from the gospel of Matthew 9:17-22, Jesus is drawing upon the old words of his religion, and he repeats the ancient wisdom that talks about the need for newness, when old is not valued as it is in some things. According to the text, Jesus said: “And no man puts new wine into old bottles: because the new wine will burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.” This modern translation uses bottles, but the earlier texts use skins, since that is how they frequently stored wine in ancient times. In both instances the wisdom being taught is that while what is old has value, newness also has its value. This is the underlying problem for much of the world today: trying to put new wine into old skins, or old bottles. For so much of the world has changed very little for centuries, and suddenly, in the scope of the 19th and 20th Centuries primarily, the effort of the West to pour so much new wine in the form of great social, political, and intellectual change into these ancient parts of the world, into these people who still live in the ancient ways, is creating a split in the fabric of many cultures, particularly that of the Middle East. Bobby Kennedy, a man wise beyond his years, once said: “Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator and change is its enemies.” Perhaps Kennedy had read Alvin Toeffler’s popular book of the time, Future Shock, where in he states: “Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” The late1960s and 1970s, became the time of real acknowledgement that the pace of life in the western world was moving too fast for the majority of people, even those in the West. And, the changing nature, the speeding up of progress, was clearly moving far beyond the scope of the so-called Third World countries to keep pace without experiencing real social shock. Some of what we are witnessing now in the Middle East is ancient in its origins, but these events are also affected by this great wave of change that has been sweeping the world. Primarily it is in the form of vast amounts of information, available at the touch of telephone or computer key. I read during some graduate course in the late 1970s, that the entire volume, scope, amount of information known to the world had doubled from the end of WWII, to 1970. Geometric progression working as it does, we can assume that it had since doubled, maybe tripled-rather like the population explosion. Sadly, the two events in consonance make for greater problems than if either happened in isolation. That is, great knowledge among a people not bent on hoarding resources for survival--or for greed--the knowledge can be absorbed since the people are not feeling the stress of trying to survive. But, couple the many-fold problems that come with over-population, lack of food, water, medicine, and education, and the impact of great amounts of knowledge, this then undoubtedly can have the same effect as putting new wine into old wine skins. Change is always hard, even when it a change we welcome, for there are always unexpected consequences from the new that are not easily absorbed some times. To bring this close to home, it has been known for a long time that great change for a church, or congregation like ours, brings some amount of difficulty, conflict, dis-satisfaction within the group. Clearly, more for some people than others. Our Board and the Building Committee talked a great deal about how to minimize this problem, and concluded, wisely, that the best option was to be as open and available as possible. Would that the various communities we call governments could act with such wisdom aforethought. George Burns, a funny and wise man whose life spanned a century, so he saw a lot more change than most of us ever will, said: “It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.” Islam is an ancient religion, or group of religions would be more accurate. Founded by Mohammed around 700 CE [AD], as the product of Abraham’s lying with his concubine, Hagar, which produced the child Ishmael. This is how the people of Islam understand their origins: as the by product of an unhappy situation, for as the Old Testament Hebrew scripture story goes, Hagar and her son are sent away, to wander out into the wilderness, after Abraham’s wife Sarah discovers that she will have a child. (By the way, it was Sarah’s idea that Abraham sleep with Hagar in the first place! Talk about fickle.) Whatever a nation’s story or a people’s story, that story informs how the culture will behave, and what they will believe about the world around them. Including the motivations of those who are different, either in intention or in conflict. What Islam is going through today, is not a new story. Every religion that exists for any length of time, will find itself at odds with the changes that have been a reliable part of human history to date. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Indigenous or primitive religions, and our own Unitarian Universalism, have all had to go through these growing pains. And, none of us are ever going to be free of the issues of change. Change is not bad, in and of itself, what becomes unhealthy or problematic is not recognizing that we human beings have a hard time with change that comes upon us too quickly. Poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant wrote: “Weep not that the world changes - did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.” Of course, change is necessary, inevitable in one way or another. We see change all our lives, but some change does not radically affect our understanding of ourselves and the world, as does the great political and social claims of modernity. We each know that we will change as we grow older. Our bodies change; our thinking changes as we are influenced by family, friends, work; our physical location changes. All these changes are expected as we grow from children to adults, but not everyone deals equally well with these expected changes. I, for one, do not like that some of my parts seem to be wearing out-I never thought I would need an overhaul in my fifties!). So, how much more difficult is it for us to have to deal with radical changes, changes that we could not, did not anticipate? I believe the ramifications of the September 11th terrorism is yet to be fully known or appreciated for the change it is forcing upon the American psyche. When we look back up the changes within Christianity-or any other religion-the parallels to what is happening in Islam today are blatant. In this country we had the First Great Awakening in the early18th Century and the Second Great Awakening in the late part of the 18th Century. Both these religious movements were evangelical- fundamentalism at its finest. Both were reacting against the absolute onslaught of the Enlightenment period and the Deism of the Founding Fathers. I am always rather amused or flummoxed-as the case may be-by modern conservatives or fundamentalists who harken back to the Founding Fathers. The fact is, the Founding Fathers were overwhelmingly Deists, which is what became termed Unitarian, who have set the whole course of modernism that is now so decried by those who think we have strayed from being a “Christian” nation. Those Founding Fathers had absolutely no intention of founding any nation that could be influenced by religion. A pretty smart bunch. The Founding Fathers and Mothers, were able to live with a great deal more change than your average citizen. In high school science we learned the physics principle that any action creates an equal and opposite reaction. My old science teacher demonstrated this with a paddle and ball attached to it by a rubber band. In the world of the human spirit, we clearly experience this fundamental physics principle, too. If we are given too much, too soon, we will react. The real frustration in this reacting, both for individuals and for societies and nations, is that we often do not realize what is happening to us until it is too late, or at least very far gone. Some of you may have been here when one of our members, Dr. Wes Bowman, talked about healing. He mentioned a patient that once had gone on a business trip to New York City, where he was mugged. While he was not injured physically, over the ensuing months that followed, it became clear that he had been injured psychologically, as he suffered constant nightmares, bouts of depression, weeping, and so on-all not characteristic of his normal self. Wisely, he sought the counsel of a professional and eventually came to terms with this emotional, psychic injury. Karen Armstrong in her wonderful book called The Battle for God, which deals with fundamentalisms in conflict today from within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes it clear that denial of what is most feared is at work for all these different groups. Fear that so much change will cause the faithful to lose hope, that the faith itself may be lost. That fear is not without merit, for in this age when we can look back into human history through the eyes of historical research, archeology, social anthropology, and so forth, we know that religions have risen, prospered, and eventually died. And that the religions as we know them now, have been aging with sometimes less success than we hoped. Heraclitus, that wise, ancient Greek philosopher taught us more than 3000 years ago: The only constant in the world is change. This is the crux of the matter for Islam: How to change without losing the important aspects of faith that make Moslems distinct from other religions. The ancient Christian church had to experience change in a pretty rough way with the Protestant Reformation when large numbers of people left the Church of Rome to form other more congenial groups, which is how we have the hundreds of Protestant churches and groups we have today-including UUs. Yet, it is arguable, that without that schism, that drastic change, the Church might not have survived at all. Islam looks like every other mainstream religion in the world, in that it has its very conservative side, or fundamentalists; it has the great middle group of moderates; and it also has a liberal side. Unfortunately, we mostly hear about the radical fundamentalists who are fighting to prevent change, or at least be in control of the change. The overwhelming numbers within the Islamic faith are not such radicals, but people of peace and faith who just want what we all want: prosperity, education, freedom. Perhaps, what they want comes in differing measures, but these are the truly fundamental goals for all people. To be safe, to be free, to be loved or respected. When we see film footage of Osama bin Laden, sitting in the dirt, wearing robes as Arab people have for centuries, showing off a modern era machine gun, talking at a camcorder, using computer technology, and using modern jet craft to carry out his plans to prevent the West from exercising so much control in the world, one can but stand in amazement at the contrasts within his conflict. Islam has been experiencing a dramatic increase in radicalizing among some groups for about fifty years. As Armstrong and many other scholars of religion have noted, what is need is for understanding and compassion for the suffering of these people; suffering that could/would send them down the paths to self-destruction and destruction of others. One can only imagine what might be the case today, if we in the west had been pouring as much money into education, sanitation, and construction as we have into ammunition for all these groups. Someone once said : “The human tendency prefers familiar horrors to unknown delights. This seems to be the condition of the Western world, even more perhaps than the Middle East. We have grown so accustomed to fighting, to war, that it never seems to occur to anyone to find a better, more peaceful, and certainly more productive end. As a people of faith, we Unitarian Universalists also have the possibility to become victim to the fundamentalist’s weakness, which is to be afraid of change, resistant to change, unwilling to change. Only by sharing our deepest fears, acknowledging our deepest longings, can we avoid the dissolution that fear reactions tend to bring upon a group. It is my fervent hope, that the old and wise will teach the new and growing that there are always better ways to move through the inevitable changes of life, and those ways do not change. For respect and appreciation of the beauty and difference that permeates the world has always and will always be what will lead us that for which we long for most. So be it. |
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